If we are to seek first the kingdom in 2025 how can we strengthen this vision? By getting a better sight of God’s vision of the world through his word.
So, how can you spend more time with God in his word in 2025?
Here is a list of some of the resources we profiled since Vision Sunday (and will continue to promote across this month).
I love Dane Ortlund’s description of what it means for us to commune with God in his book ‘Deeper’:
… To read is to hear his voice. And to hear his voice of comfort and counsel is to hear an invitation to become the human being God destined you to be.
So build Bible reading into your life in the way you build breakfast into your life. After all, we humans are habit-forming creatures. Our morning coffee, our evening dessert, the way we care for our vehicles, our methods for decompressing such as jogging or movie or bird-watching – and all our habits reflect an acquired taste, over a long period of time, resulting in daily rituals without which we do not feel we have lived a normal day. And I want to say: Make the Bible your central daily ritual. Make it your habit without which you have not lived a normal day. By no means allow this to become a law towering over you and condemning you…. Stay hooked up to the IV of gospel and help and counsel and promise by reading the Bible each day. Draw life and strength from scriptures.
… Take your asthmatic soul in one hand and the oxygen tank of the Bible in your other hand, and bring the two together. Reading the Bible is inhaling.
And praying is exhaling. Breathe in; breathe out. We take in the life-giving words of God, and we breathe them back out to God in prayer.
… We can easily think of these two disciplines as independent activities. We read the Bible, and we pray. But the most effective way to pray is to turn your Bible reading into prayer. And the best way to read the Bible is prayerfully. [1]
In 2025, may our reading of the Bible prayerfully help us to align our vision to our Heavenly Father’s, as we together seek first His kingdom.
How is your Bible memorisation going!? Remember Matthew 6:19-34? I have started mine so far from verse 25 and here is my (unedited) attempt below…
Therefore, I tell you do not worry about your life. What you will eat or drink or the body what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothes. Look at the birds of the air they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life. And why do you worry about clothes. See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labour or spin. I yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like one of these.
How did I go?
Praise God for his mercies in our small grammatical errors!!!
SP
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[1] D. Ortlund Deeper: Real Change for Real sinners (Illinois: Crossway 2021), 151-152.
